Pirate Bay Flooded with Hackers Trying to Hack You

The Pirate Bay is one of the biggest torrent sites for piraters of all kinds to gather and share their torrents from games, to movies, to cracked programs and more. The Pirate Bay has always had discussions about the legality of copy right and certain viewpoints of file sharing and more recently has become a platform for an anti-copyright political initiative. After being chased aruond with several domain shutdowns and countless seizures, they are still running in 2018. Now while all The Pirate bay allows is for users to download and contribute torrent files (through magnet links or direct downloads) – rampant hackers are taking to the platform to get to your computer. Here’s how.

Pirate Bay users need to always check how they’re downloading their torrents (what client they’re using in particular) because it is with their client that they are viewing and controlling what is being downloaded onto their computer through one of the most popular torrent sites in the world. And if you’re using the Transmission torrent client to download torrents, you have to be aware of the cybersecurity threats posed to you and your computer. Project Zero, a Google initiative has reported that a major flaw allows hackers to download and run malicious code on users’ devices. And while they warned that Transmission was affected, they are also saying that Transmission is NOT alone and that other torrent downloading clients are most likely also prone to this exploit. Tavis Ormandy, security researcher for the team submitted a proof of concept of the attack which included affected users that were downloading torrents through their susceptible torrent clients through a web browser. He went on to say that hackers can use this exploit of horrendous security and take control of your computer through the client. These torrent clients that do have the remote access function enabled tend to be completely unprotected – and don’t require the hackers to even attempt to enter a password or go through any form of authentication. Shocking! He went on further to say that the exploit worked through multiple web browsers inclusive of Google Chrome and Mozilla Firefox browsers on Windows and Linux. However he also did mention that other platforms and browsers are also expected to be affected. He went on to add that this flaw was the ”first of a few remote code execution flaws in various popular torrent clients.”

Ormandy and his team only went public about the find after they had developed and released a fix. Torrent client, Transmission had a development official tell ArsTechnica that a fix was on the way “ASAP” with no official release date. He also went on to say that the cybersecurity flaw was at open at risk when users enabled remote access and disabled password protection. So this is a call out to all torrent users that run torrent clients to make sure they have the latest UPDATED patch of your torrent client to make sure this flaw is fixed. Otherwise, make sure you take care of your remote access security.